Obsessive hacker tools like Emacs are not a productivity enhancer. But If you find them fun go for it. You are allowed to have fun. You are allowed to enjoy your environment. If tinkering with Emacs is fun for you go for it. It's prob not replacing mental cycles for "productive" work. It's replacing zoning out with social media or YouTube between productive work times.
I can't justify using Emacs myself on a productivity basis. But working in an environment I think is fun while being productive makes me marginally happier.
Data centers could pay locals a sufficient amount that it overcomes the NIMBY opposition. If you can’t pay locals enough while still generating value for external beneficiaries then the project simply isn’t economical.
Data as an obstacle to legal AI is a human rights violation.
As citizens we are subject to federal, state, and local law. This consists of statutes, regulations, and common law. It is insane that the content of this law is locked away behind private paywalls.
How can one comply with laws when you aren't told what those laws are?
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
This is why I beg people to send me their raw prompts rather than the output of running that prompt through a generic LLM. Same semantic content in a half page prompt as the 10 page stochastic text expansion LLM memo version but 1. takes me 1/10th the time to process and 2. I'm not forced to guess which ideas are real ideas I need to respond to and which are just text expansion ghosts.
I beg people to send me their prompts rather than the stochastic text expanded drivel they send me as memos/plans/etc... Massive waste of my time responding to ghosts - actually taking 10 pages seriously that often the "author" has barely read. I'd much rather get some unstructured bullet points if those are actually a person's ideas.
I love AI. Used well it's a massive enhancer to make things. But yeah whats the value of a presentation that the presenter is also seeing for the first time. Not just zero. Since it wasted everyone's time and bandwidth the value is negative.
The inevitable outcome here is that designed materials become so generic and infinitely produceable that they become worthless background noise. We are well on the way to that path.
For almost all materials the only value of getting a seriously produced work of design (i.e., the "make me a magazine-style pitch deck for our seed round" this design engine mentions) is a signaling function that some combination of effort and capital went into its production. Yes, the 1 in a 10,000 work of design adds some actual value. But usually it's just a filtering mechanism. The purpose of making a powerpoint deck before a meeting is rarely the value of a deck. Rather it is signaling that someone spent some time actually organizing their thoughts instead of bloviating spontaneously.
All of this is lost with AI led design. Producing designed artifacts are free and instant. Yeah you will impress the old folks for a year or so who haven't caught onto the joke. Eventually this just becomes pointless table stakes. Just the same way desktop publishing was in the 90s. You impressed the old folks for a bit until it all became background noise table stakes.
Can we add to the software failure list that Finder is an underpowered mess? Like the author said, fixing Finder won't have a correspondingly visible ROI. But haven't any of the Apple developers using these machines just said "ENOUGH" already. I used to like Pathfinder and was willing to just pay for that as an alternative but that software is just buggy enough that it's annoying to rely on for something as important as file management.
Cook was an able steward of Apple. Under his leadership the hardware side continued to iteratively improve nicely. Apple Silicon is good stuff. I am firmly embedded in the entire Apple ecosystem and have no reason to leave.
I do wish Apple used some of its massive cash hoard and market power to do better in software. The iPad remains my favorite form factor to use in lots of my day but Apple never invested in killer app software optimized for it. Same with VisionPro although maybe that story is just early. The VisionPro store demo was the closest I felt to tech magic since I was a kid in the 80s. The price was high but not prohibitively so. Rather, I could tell that there was just no reason to use it day to day because there wasn't enough software optimized for it.
I've lost track of the Apple Cash hoard which was insane some years ago but it would have been better for Apple to proactively invest in developing killer apps/uses for it's admirable hardware versus going into producing TV shows and movies because Hollywood people are fun to hang out with.
Cook did his job. Apple's supply chain didn't collapse and almost kill the company like in the 90s. But I hope we see some of the old innovative spirit come back. I want that "wow" moment again where I don't just get an iteratively improved version of what I already have but something new!
If you enjoyed coding for the sake of coding it hasn't gone anywhere. People still knit for themselves when they can go buy clothes off the rack. People still enjoy chess and Go even though none of them can beat a machine.
If you enjoyed that you could do something the rest of the world can't - well yeah some of that is somewhat gone. The "real programmers" who could time the execution of assembly instructions to the rotation speed of an early hard drive prob felt the same when compilers came around.
It has rekindled my joy however. Agentic development is so powerful but also so painful and it's the painful parts I love. The painful parts mean there is still so much to create and make better. We get to live in a world now where all of this power is on our home computers, where we can draw on all the world's resources to build in realtime, and where if we make anything cool it can propagate virally and instantly, and where there are blank spaces in every direction for individuals to innovate. Pretty cool in my view.
A problem with mythologizing past defeat is it can lead to sacrificing the present and future. Some people have the need to live in a grand mythic narrative. Others just want decent lives for themselves and their children with security and a future.
Apple hasn't been able to ship software in decades.
They got bored of computing. Writing was on the wall when they started producing movies because Hollywood people are cooler than nerds and hey why earn a giant cash pile if not for some execs to have fun with it.
This is a company which hasn't done anything meaningful to innovate since Steve Jobs died.
Yeah I have all Apple gear. It's fine. Whatever. Nicest commodity on the block. But they could have done so much more in the last 15 years.
Since I sadly must return to the real world (but thank you everyone for the well spirited debate) -- string theory is funny to me because its a bit of a Rorschach test as such a tiny number of people who follow the subject can actually evaluate string theory vs. alternative models. It's just an abstract blob people can project their worldview onto. To the extent someone reading this is in the group who does understand the topic, this isn't about you--
As a society we can't place excess faith in the orthodox positions of institutions. We all know they can be rigid, wrong, and lock out dissenting views. But society today seems to embrace heterodoxy for its own sake the way perhaps in the past orthodoxy was just accepted on pure faith and there is a vast media ecosystem happy to promote (ie monetize) this worldview. Just because something is heterodox doesn't make it right.
How many primary school students can't add fractions because string theory may be a less promising approach to a ToE versus loop quantum gravity or geometric unity? I know nothing about this stuff. You know nothing about this stuff. Since we both do know about the Bourbaki school of mathematics despite having different opinions on the value of building mathematics upward from foundational principles I'd say we are in the top .5% of the planet re general mathematical/scientific literacy. So I don't buy that even if string theory is wrong there is some massive spillover effect.